I'd Rather be Us than Them

Victory! The GOP-led Senate just passed the most hateful bill in history, the bill they couldn't wait to pass, and they're still not happy.

Lisa Murkowski minutes after voting ‘yes’ on Big Ugly Bill - Annabelle Gordon/Annabelle Gordon/Reuters

Did you see Lisa Murkowski’s face yesterday? Which time, you ask? The time she marched down the hall after the vote, looking horrified about something? Or the time the reporter asked her if she’d heard what her colleague, Rand Paul, said about her vote, and she stood stock still and silent for so many seconds I thought the film had frozen? (See video below)

As furious as I was all day yesterday, I thought—both times— ‘there is a woman who will be haunted by her complicity for the rest of her life’. I’ve seen that look on her face before. You can’t have even a shred of conscience and still think you can ever be happy climbing into bed with the ugly, vicious mob foisting the Worst New Rules in the World on a hapless American public. Once you’ve climbed into bed with them, they’ll own you. They will expect loyalty forevermore, and if you should balk, even once, they will make you pay.

Lisa Murkowski has known that for a while now. Every now and then we hear mewlings from her that suggest dissatisfaction—sometimes even disgust—but she only goes so far, and then, like many an abused partner, she shuts the door to freedom and hides behind it once more.

She has spoken out against her fellow accomplices, I’ll give her that, but words are just words with no action. (See Susan Collins of Maine.) I don’t know who Murkowski is trying to please when she says, “I don’t like that”, but it’s clear she doesn’t see herself as someone worth pleasing. She might as well be saying, “I don’t like me”.

I use Murkowski as an example only because she’s the most recent of the regime team members to kinda sorta suggest there might be something wrong with how they’re running the club. Or NOT running the club. (They can’t only just now realize they have no power anymore. Any checks and balances have to be run by Donald Trump. Preferably with dollar signs attached.)

In a masterful word salad worthy of one Donald Trump himself, Murkowski tries to explain her reasoning in that halting voice politicians use when they clearly don’t have an answer but they know they have to say words for the camera and what the hell are they going to say when even they know nothing they’re about to say is going to make sense?

"Let's not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process— a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation— and we all know it. My sincere hope is that this is not the final product. This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President's desk. We need to work together to get this right."

Oh, my. Just think of how much easier it would have been to just say no. “No” would have been the appropriate response to such a blatantly awful, historically vile, monstrously damaging bill. Right from the start, when all those pages started coming in, every Republican could have pretended they weren’t joining with the Democrats, but, instead, could have come up with their own valid reasons for why that bill was insane.

But, no. Leakers tell us many of them talked big time shit about it behind closed doors but then went into the chamber knowing theirs would be a ‘yes’ vote. All but three of them in the Senate. All but one of them in the house.

There was this hint of a standoff in the House the night before the vote, until Speaker Johnson pounded them with whatever magic words he had to pull out of his warped repertoire, and all but one folded:

The procedural "rule" vote was 219-213, with one Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, joining all Democrats in opposition. At one point, five Republicans had voted "no" on the rule, while eight others did not vote, but Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., managed [to] sway them overnight.

So that’s the state of the Republicans right now. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Do they have any friends they can trust? Can they ever look themselves in a mirror again without wanting to smash it? Will they, in the end, survive this any better than anyone else? What will become of them when this is over and they have to pay up?

All of this must be going through their minds, and all they can hope for is that it will never end. Maybe if they keep voting in ways that please their mad master, they can stall it for a long, long while. Maybe they can go on pretending nobody is getting hurt. Maybe they can convince a maddeningly relentless press that their words mean something without having to admit they don’t know what they mean, either.

Oh, woe is them! I mean, really. There are 273 Republicans in Congress and almost all of them are holding their noses and sticking together to defend a lost cause, because they know, as mob members, there’s no way out. They know it, they know we know it, and all they can hope for is that their silly, irresponsible, mean, nasty leader, Donald Trump, never finds out that ‘they don’t like it’.

It’s a good thing, I guess, that their hearts have hardened…

Or have they?

So honestly, even with all we’ve been through, wouldn’t you rather be us than them?

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